Part I - What is a Weird Internet Career?

I needed the money. Who didn’t need money? And plenty of people far duller than me were cashing in on beauty tutorials. Starting a regimen was one of the last remaining ways to make good money, to be your own boss—to help people, to share what I knew with the world. And I knew far more than most skin-care influencers—though influencer was not yet a

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There's another more subtle lesson in the list of fields with superlinear returns: not to equate work with a job. For most of the 20th century the two were identical for nearly everyone, and as a result we've inherited a custom that equates productivity with having a job. Even now to most people the phrase "your work" means their job. But to a writ... See more

We are living in an age where sometimes the best path to making a living “doing what you love” is finding creative ways to monetize not necessarily the craft itself, but all the things that surround the craft: how you write, where you write, who you write with and learn from, your knowledge about writing, etc. You might discover you can make far mo

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Getting a job through compulsive tweeting marked my first exposure to the digital attention economy that was beginning to monopolize the Internet. I grasped a new formula: content = attention = followers = profit. Anything that made enough noise online could be monetized in one way or another. My online presence increasingly felt like a carefully c... See more